Nonprofit RFPs vs RFCs
 
[00:00:00] . Following on with our favorite guest of the moment right now, Heather Yandow, of course, founder of nonprofit.ist, nonprofit ist, and consultant at third Space. We are talking about whether or not, because this has been coming up a lot, will G p t destroy RFPs? And I know you are the, like captain of the team, of folks that think RFCs request for conversations are superior and many ways to RFPs request for proposals.
[00:00:54] So we're gonna throw a lot of acronyms out here. Where and how do you think our conversation since the last time we had it with regard to R F P? Versus R F C is in the landscape now of G P T. So I think it's just gotten more complicated, more muddy, and I lean even more towards requests for conversations now.
[00:01:17] You know, one of the things that I have already started seeing is chat, G P t AI generated cover letters. So I just hired for a position. Hmm. And one of the cover letters was clearly generated by ai. It used exactly the same language, and it didn't mention that the person who was applying had a personal connection to me.
[00:01:39] So to those, those were red flags. Didn't even have to use any tool, just read it and thought, this is not right. So we're already starting to see it. I suspect that if I was a nonprofit putting out a, a request for proposals, I would've already gotten some that were AI generated. So it's becoming, RFPs in my opinion, are becoming increasingly useless, increasingly challenging when the goal is to actually find the right consultant to help you with your challenge.
[00:02:10] For sure. I think, you know, we're using G P T synonymously with any generative AI tool that will create an output based on an input. I think there are ways of designing this, but I think there are tiers, right? Mm-hmm. I think, frankly, legally speaking, if you have government funded projects you have to solicit for, and with RFPs, request for proposals is just part of the game.
[00:02:35] You need three competitive bids. And that's just how the government cookie crumbles. Yep. There's a lot of white space below that though, however, where, you know, I see small projects, we'll call them projects under 60 K or even under 30 K, where if you put out an R F P, like is disturbingly easy to generate a proposal?
[00:02:56] Like I have a proposal generator for for whole whale. I don't use it because it's just not how we go about it. But let's say I was a do anything now shop. Literally, I could just go through, copy a proposal, put it in, see if I get it, and then go forward. And I think there's real risk of having massive you know, signal to noise issues in that process.
[00:03:20] Does, how does that land for you? Yeah, I absolutely think so. I mean, you know, putting together proposals. Is super time consuming especially for small shops. You know, there are two and a half of us, so to muster the resources it takes to put together a really good proposal is a heavy lift, and I can absolutely see why using chat G P T or something else, like it would be really attractive, right?
[00:03:48] It's certainly going to reduce the amount of time I'm gonna have to spend writing. It can be a, a good jumping off point. I think that what we're likely to see is that those. Organizations who can take advantage of it. So particularly those organizations, those nonprofit consulting firms who have people who write proposals are gonna probably take advantage of it.
[00:04:11] And George, they might be, you know, doing it with all of the respect and within the bounds of good AI usage, which I know you think and talk a lot. But I do think it's gonna create more proposals and not necessarily more useful proposals for nonprofits to review.
[00:04:28] Yeah, I think all roads lead to conversations, though. They do. I think at some point, you know, you'll vet, you'll go through, there's just a lot more processing that ends up happening on the nonprofit side, albeit ironically, you c